The voice of paradise, with feathers. The Karyōbinga is one of the loveliest beings in all of Buddhist myth — a creature of the Pure Land with the head and arms of a bodhisattva and the body, wings, and long sweeping tail of a bird. Its gift is its voice. It's said to sing more exquisitely than any other creature that exists, so sublime that the Buddha's own preaching is likened to its song — and legend holds that the karyōbinga sings even before it hatches, its perfect voice already ringing out from inside the unbroken shell. In paradise imagery it drifts through the Western Pure Land, sometimes cradling musical instruments, forever making the music of enlightenment.

It arrives here on a surimono — a privately commissioned, deluxe print made outside the commercial market, produced with the finest pigments and papers and often paired with poetry, exchanged among cultivated circles rather than sold in shops. New Year editions like this carried good wishes for the year ahead, and the paradise-bird is a perfect subject for one: auspicious, elegant, a touch rarefied. And it's Hokusai — the same restless genius behind the Great Wave, here working in jewel-like miniature rather than grand landscape, lavishing that attention on a single celestial bird.

A Karyōbinga (迦陵頻伽, Kalaviṅka), from a surimono (摺物, New Years Card) 1820.

Katsushika Hokusai (葛飾北斎, 1760-1849)